


Calling

by Numina



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Cancer, Castiel on a Misson, Comforting Castiel, Crying, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Homophobic Community, M/M, Some minor goofy worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-11 12:05:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15315138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Numina/pseuds/Numina
Summary: As every angel is occasionally called to do, Castiel sets aside his own heavy burdens of guilt and loss to sit with a stranger in theirs. It is an important and complicated calling for any of the mysterious creatures of an absent God, but Castiel's callings can never be merely complicated.





	Calling

**Author's Note:**

> This story touches on a lot of stuff I use elsewhere, but is actually older than any of my other fics on AO3. I don't actually remember what season I was basing this on, though I seem to have left myself some clues. Once I figure it out I will tag accordingly.

For angels, comfort and penance are like two separate bells that ring at the same frequency. Their shape and material may differ wildly, but the sounding of one can create sympathetic vibrations in the other, and for each sounding it can be difficult to divine which one initiated the other. They are like the body and the soul, or the Word and the universe.

Castiel was doing penance, offering comfort. He reasoned that it was part of what angels were made for, even if God wasn't around to see. It gave him the sort of comfort a penitent seeks, and so was probably right. When his own path grew fraught with complications and regrets, when he was too close to those close to him or too separated by their natures, it was good to find someone in pain, a stranger, and simply sit with them and give them care.

It was an abstract penance: not as direct as lifting the actual rubble of his errors with his raw hands and bearing it stoically away on his bruised and wingless shoulders, but not so wholly devoid of material purpose as clasping those same hands to pray to a vaulted ceiling with his shoulders bowed in mortification. That night, his hands were for holding hers, his shoulders were for her tears. It was the sort of penance he preferred in the spare time he took away from the other two sorts, and it felt well worth the hassle of navigating human transportation.

That night it was Rachel. "Ray" to her friends, "Rachel" to her entire family and town.

Rachel was grieving. Like all things to an angel's senses, it was a kind of rushing music, sublime and humbling. Grief in particular had a stark simplicity, defiant of reason and asking for none.

She was too young, and she was very old, struck through with a ritual pain older than himself, yet fresh and raw-scraped in every iteration. He said nothing against her wordless keening. No “there there”, no “don't cry”, no “hush now”. He would not for the world disturb the chiming of her soul, even as its sounding seemed like it might shatter her.

He put an arm around her shoulders in reverent silence, and she collapsed against him. For a while he was the shape of her outer edge, her negative space, defining her existence more reliably than she could do for herself. He sat still and straight as an obelisk and kept the resonance of his heartbeat and his breathing slow and steady, matching their higher-plane sound to the song of her pain in a gentle descant, lending her a sacramental comfort she could not entirely perceive but received nonetheless.

The resonance came easily between them. She was a person of courage and will in a situation where neither applied. She was alienated from her family for being different. She had fallen a long way for love.

He could relate.

She had accepted him almost as soon as she had opened the door, recognized his presence and purpose without a word and had just begun crying, first in gratitude and then, eventually, for herself. It felt good to be recognized, to be trusted to do the things he was made to do. So he sat, and let the song pour through him, and listened, bearing witness.

She reached her gradual decrescendo, tears still flowing as freely as grace down his trenchcoat's unstained lapel. He soothed her, subtly softening the granite firmness of his posture and the intensity of their communal bond, letting his own mind wander slightly from hers, giving her room to gather herself back into her own shape.

Giving her his presence, devoid of his own concerns, was as comforting to him as it was to her. As delicate as the process could be, it was meditatively simple, and he shared in the harmonic catharsis of her grieving just as she shared in the timeless calm of his company. He wondered if Dean would judge him for that, for communing with the vulnerable; accuse him of feeding on mortal resources in that barking tone he used for recriminations; fixing him (again) with that stare he reserved for monst- no.

He brushed the painful thought away gently, gently, promising to come back for it. Thinking of Dean, how they had left things, was an entirely different kind of penance, and a very cold comfort. He needed to be present, in the moment.

Still, even as one thought wafted away, another rippled into its place. If Dean could see him in his offices as an angel of mercy, see Rachel pressed against his side, would Dean finally understand why Castiel always dressed for rain? That the invitation for unashamed tears was always open? Castiel had always assumed it was obvious and poetically unobtrusive, but did Dean understand? Would he care if he did?

His heart thumped once, hard, as he swallowed his failure of clarity. Rachel swallowed in unison and sat up away from him, regarding him steadily with eyes that were red-rimmed but lucid. She patted his ancient, youthful hand with her young and well-worn one, and they shared a wan smile. He gave her his steady gaze. Apparently no one in town knew how to look her in the eye anymore, and that oceanic awkwardness, as much as anything else, had made her lonely in the wake of her loss. Her smile warmed.

“Are you really an angel?” her voice was low and steady where it started, skipping only slightly on the gravel she'd made of her throat.

He felt that an honest _For what little that means sometimes_ would not be comforting, would be too self-indulgent, so he said nothing and hoped his eyes would answer her. His vessel's eyes were bright blue, with stern dark brows and a soft downward slant at the outer corners that gave a correct impression of endless sympathy.

She studied his eyes carefully as he gazed back, and seemed to find a satisfactory answer, venturing a follow-up, “But why come to me?”

That one was so much easier, to the point that it almost confused him, “You called, and I heard you.”

“Um, sure. But I mean, really. Me?” She rolled her eyes, indicating both herself and the bedroom she had shared with her lover. Both had a cozy, lived-in quality overlaid with a thin patina of recent chaos. A clutter of pill bottles and sundry medical packaging spilled from the dresser top, swarming the meticulously curated tchotchkies more native to that terrain. Her soft ash-brown hair was streaked with a recent addition of gray, and had seized upon her damp face with an aggression that belied its nonthreatening, low-maintenance cut.

“You called and I heard you. So I came.”

Her smooth cheek creased in a guileless smirk as she tucked a tear-slicked lock behind one ear, “Must be the slowest prayer-day in history. There some shortage of suffering in The Congo today? Or at St. Jude's? I'm small potatoes.”

Castiel felt that acidic twinge of genuine confusion that so often came from trying to talk to humans using verbal language. Especially English. English was a mess. He tried saying it slower. “You. Called.”

Her thin brows lowered and separated slightly, an expression he recognized as the human indication of trying very hard to listen despite an enormous burden of doubt, or fearing that a mistake made in their favor was going to be recognized and withdrawn, “Did I? I mean, not consciously, I'm sure. I mean, I'm not-” she groped for a word and settled for “-religious.”

In the span of a needle-fine moment, an entire theo-philosophical argument expanded across the front of Castiel's mind and was rejected as inapt. Ten years prior, he might have tried to reason with her, or point out that the word “religious” was an inadequate definition of the quality she meant it to reference, or how the fact that she had called and he had heard her was the more profound criteria in any case. But she didn't want an explanation, however marvelous, of the metaphysical sympathies that make a particular angel hear the call, conscious or unconscious, of a particular human. Not really.

He took her hand from where it worried at her earlobe and gave her fingers a squeeze “You did, in your pain. I'm here. For you. Because you called. And I heard you.”

Her lip trembled, oddly girlish on a face well-worn with lines of formidable determination.

He added gently, “It matters.”

Her eyes welled again though her shoulders stayed square and she nodded, permitting herself to surrender to the previously-unbelievable, “Thank you. It's been really hard. I keep trying to be strong but strong just ain't cutting it this time,” she gave a grim chuckle that reminded him of Bobby, and studied the pile of their hands. They were quiet for a time, comfortably, then she looked into his eyes again, “I feel-” she coughed and sniffled and started again, “I feel like I already know that you can't answer the things I want to ask. I don't know how I know that.”

“It's alright to ask,” It was true, though she was right. He smiled in what he hoped was a comfortingly jocular manner, “Just don't ask me anything about unstoppable forces, immovable objects, and rocks too heavy for God to lift.”

Her smile at his joke was perhaps a bit polite, but her words were earnest, “Is there a heaven? Did she go to heaven? If an angel can answer my prayers, she can go to heaven, right?” her eyes shone with hope, pleading.

He thought of the sorry state of heaven and called on all his meager powers of prevarication to answer her honestly, “It would make sense.”

“Will I...will I ever see her again?”

Castiel's brows drew directly together in pity, etching a small crease in between, and his Grace ached in his throat as the Words that made him to be what he was blocked the words she wanted to hear. Only the truth, he reminded himself. Only the small-t-truth. “You will see her as often as you look for her. In everything good.”

She scowled and turned her head away briefly, but nodded, long practiced in accepting disappointing answers when interrogating the nature of the world, “Do you understand love? Is that something angels...do? Or is that just the kind of angel you are?”

He blinked, surprised and feeling inexplicably threatened by her sincere and casual interest, more a deliberate change of subject than a challenge, “I am...just an angel. I am here in the offices of mercy.”

She smiled at his consternation with a beatific impishness that reminded him of Sam, or of Charlie, “Now, I didn't mean anything by that. You're not my type, and I'm too old for that sort of thing anyway.”

The knot of confusion between his eyes did not loosen, “You're forty.”

Her lower lip pursed in a sort of facial shrug, and her shoulders rose and fell with a deep sigh, “You know the expression about being as old as you feel? Three months ago I was forty. Today I'm just...too damn old.” Some small, ambitious wave of sorrow lapped onto her expression, scotching the shallow smile she had drawn there. She took a deep breath and continued a little more nakedly, “I just meant, do you know what it's like, to lose someone you love more than...” her hand flopped over like a stranded fish “ _anything_.”

The word sent an enochian throb through him, sounding with the kind of power that is the language of angels, and it communicated to him the complete inadequacy of everything she had ever seen, done, imagined, dreamed, or craved; all of it serving only to highlight the shape of one other human being in negative, the infinite universe just a gaudy frame for the lack of one soul.

He paused for a moment in due reverence to the uniqueness and wholeness of the Spoken word burning quietly between them where only he could see it, like a sun-spot on his retina. Like a sun-spot, as he let it pass its saturation of colors inverted themselves: the whole of the purpose of creation faded into darkness, and the dark spot of a lost beloved filled with the negative-of-negative, filled in his own mind's eye by the figure of his own friend. His good friend. Dean. His...Dean.

He took a centering breath and gave himself back to the present and to the fulfillment of Rachel's prayer, “If I didn't...understand,” he had wanted to say “resonate” but imagined it would cloud the issue, “I wouldn't have heard you. But I can't say I know what it's like. Not exactly. Not what it's like for you. That's why I'm here. To listen.”

It was her turn to catch a shadow of perplexity in her expression, but she nodded slowly, looking down at her hand and twisting the braided silver ring around her fourth finger. “We've...we'd...been together fifteen years,” she smiled wistfully, her tone burgeoning with nuanced strains of memory, “We only just proposed to each other four months ago. Same night as the court decision,” a broad, brash, brief smile shone from her, “We were still going to do it. Next week, actually. We have,” she coughed, “...had...bus tickets to New York, to get it done someplace that would be happier to see us, maybe take a fancy spa day for our honeymoon since her...since her back had been hurting,” Rachel winced hard, freeing more tears, regret cutting off reminiscence, “If we'd just have been married, years ago, she'd have had insurance a lot sooner, through my job...she was an artist...I'm just a pencil-pusher...and still...” she wrapped her arms around her own stomach and squeezed hard, leaning towards him just a hair.

He put his arms around her shoulders again, gathering her constricted silhouette against him and squeezing tightly, as if compressing the flesh could dampen the pained chiming of the soul. He resonated, easily speaking with absolute conviction,“It wasn't your fault.”

She let loose a pained sob-laugh that jerked her whole frame, but he held her.

“Rachel. It wasn't. You couldn't have known she was sick. Even the doctor didn't catch it.”  
  
She pushed away more gently but still shook, nodding, and he let her go, “I know, I know that, and by that time it would have been too late even if he had. There was no reason to think... I mean she was the...” she gulped a laugh, “she was the health nut. Always so careful...younger than me, too. Was going to be forty next muh...month...”

Her eyes squeezed shut and a grim stifled laugh rattled the cage of her shoulders, unable to escape, scouring at her heart from the inside. Through their resonance, Castiel could feel a squalid bitterness spreading through her gut, dark and numbing and poisonous, sapping her will to speak, to bother. He knew, like he knew his own name, that there was a beautifully wrapped box hidden behind the suitcases in the closet, and a package of novelty candles in a drawer in the kitchen. He knew that the thought of them burned her like acid.  
  
He put a tender hand on her cheek, gazing at her and banishing the demon emotion with its name, “It isn't fair.”

The cruel anesthetic retreated and she echoed him fiercely, “It's not! She was such a good person. Her life was- her life was _real_. Hers and mine. And after everything we've survived together, everything we've...” she ran out of breath and inhaled with a shudder, shaking with anger, “We had...we were going to...how can she just be _gone_?! Everything _failed_ her.”   
  
She stood up and he let her go. She moved impulsively around the bedroom, touching things, taking up a tissue and blowing her nose. She caught a look at herself in the mirror and smiled ruefully, retrieving a wet washcloth from the bathroom and brusquely wiping her face as she continued to putter.

She sighed, “She was smart, though. She'd gotten the Obamacare. Had a will. She was the one made sure we'd set up power of attorney years ago. Her so-called family won't be able to just walk in here and take...” she gulped, clutching an old music box protectively, “take our things.”

She pressed the cool cloth against her eyes one more time and laid it aside, winding the music box and carrying it with her as she continued the aimless ritual of pointing out to him the strangely hollowed-out artifacts of a shared life, like seashells whose creatures had gone. The music box was well-made, and the fine inlay helped amplify the organ of plucked metal that sang within, a tune named 'Till there was you.

She moved carefully, oddly cautious of the well-scrubbed stains on the floor on one side of the bed, at last putting the music box on the bedside table next to Castiel. A pair of reading glasses had been abandoned there, carelessly askew. She fiddled with them a moment, but as she tried to put them away in the drawer her hand and arm stopped halfway, then slowly retracted, holding the glasses to her heart as she swayed back and forth to the music, awash in memory.

He stood up and held out a hand in a manner too sincere to be properly gallant. Her small smile struggled heroically to lift itself up. and did a laudable job. She took his hand and stepped into him as he put a hand on her waist, her other hand and her head resting easily on his other shoulder. She murmured softly, “you know I usually lead.”

He nodded and rested his cheek on her hair, “I'm not worthy to take her place.”

The tears came again, and they swayed together, drifting, stopping when the music stopped but not parting.

She took a long and futile draw at her clogged nose and sighed, “Do you know what the worst part is?”

Castiel shook his head, “Not for you. Tell me.”

“It's the selfishness.” her voice quavered and she could not look him in the eye, “The truth is, I would give anything to have her back for one day, even the worst day, when she was wasted and suffering and humiliated by her broken body, evaporating in front of me as the cancer ate her alive. I would take that day in a heartbeat just to have her here to hold. And it's not...” she gulped, ashamed, “not because I miss loving her. I still love her, I'll always-”

She cut herself off and gazed at him, her juddering train of thought momentarily self-derailed, procrastinating, wondering if she sounded foolish saying “always” to an immortal, “- or for as long as I've got. But what I miss...I miss being loved by her. I miss myself through her eyes, knowing that I'll never be that person again. I miss being _hers._ And the way I am without her, without our plans, without our life, it makes me know I never deserved," she gulped, "to be loved like that at all.”

Tight, weary little sobs lapped at her chest gently but insistently, like the beginning of a tidal shift, and she looked into his eyes, trying to find her self-loathing reflected there in the wake of her confession. It didn't truly surprise her to find compassion and pain-for-her-pain in his gentle features, but she was wholly unprepared for how brutally this unconditional compassion stirred her sorrow. Instead of stilling the salt tide, seeing her own pain reflected back to her unvarnished by any spite or judgment sent quakes through all her careful levees. Being shown a compassion that demanded no defense, her exhausted defenses crumbled, and the horror of her raw, senseless loss rushed in to drown her.

As she collapsed, Castiel held her tight and drew her down into his lap on the floor like a child, rocking her and soothing her with small, low sounds in his chest. There was no danger of interference then; his own heart was scourged by the same pain, attuned to the same unhearable, unbearable sound. He knew what it was like.

His own eyes brimmed and sent a gentle rain down into her hair where her head was tucked beneath his chin. He communed with her agony. A hundred years previous, or ten, he might have tried to tell her that there was no shame in longing to be loved, failing to stop the unstoppable, wanting someone beyond what was wise or even right. He knew better than to try. Some kinds of pain run so deep that they are their own sole remedy.

His angelic nature accepted her penance freely, reforming it into comfort, concentrating it into an energy he could return to her, if she would have it; a resonant seed of transmuted pain that would, in time, propagate the conversion until she could find balance again.

Tenderly he drew her chin up until he could see her eyes, speaking firmly but so softly that she had to feel the words more than hear them. 

“These things you regret are not for me to forgive.”

She trembled on the edge of a fearsome despair, but did not look away.

“But you loved her. You knew her heart. Imprinted her close upon you.”

A wobble of her head that resolved into a nod.

“Would she forgive you?”

A smile that said volumes across a quivering mouth.

“Would you accept it?”

She sighed deeply and nodded again, her heartbeat slowing to the speed of his own with a dreamlike understanding.

He moved his face a fraction closer to her own and tilted his head ever so slightly to the side, offering her his lips with the same chaste sincerity of offering his hand to dance. It was an angel's bargain, sealed with a kiss at the way-points of life, a contract far older than the perverted negative-sum bargains of demons at the crossed-roads of earth.

She met him, eyes closed, lips parted, accepting his breath and the unseen glow of energy it conferred. He breathed the Word that meant both penance and comfort in the first language of the universe. The tenderness of it spread through her weary limbs and aching guts, and she felt sleep's liquid clarity begin to seep into her mind for the first time in days.

He held onto the sweetness of her gradual slackening, and lifted her into the bed so easily she felt like she was floating. He pulled a blanket up and kissed her again, on the forehead. “You won't remember me,” he murmured.

She nodded dreamily, smiling, “It would probably only freak me out if I did. No offense.”

The tenderness and humor of humans always touched him, and he smiled, “None taken.”

“Castiel?”

“Yes.”

“What is love for? If it can't even cure some piss-ant cowardly murdering monster like cancer, what is love for? If it had been a sword, a gun, a fist, my love for her could have killed death itself. Why isn't it actually _good_ for anything? Why does it leave us wrecked and adrift like this?”

He was grateful that she couldn't see the deep line of doubt that creased his brow, and felt fortunate that he had lived among humans long enough to understand that the honest answer, _I don't know_ , was neither wanted nor necessary. She was slipping into a deep sleep even as he cast about for something to say.

He thought about negative spaces, about counterparts and contrast and sympathy and resonance. And rocks too big for God to lift. And Dean. He opened his mouth to say nothing useful, to at least let her know that, for what it was worth, he understood what she meant all too well, but instead she murmured from a place of receding consciousness, ”I'll be alright. If you see her, tell her I'll be alright. And I love her. So mu-” and then she slept, breathing calmly at the bottom of a very dark sea, slumbering as the offered cure began to take hold.

He turned to the door, glancing at the clock for whether he could make the bus or needed to call a cab, but he stopped, hindered by a sense of something unfinished. Though their connection was fading, his Being still hummed with all that she had let him share in, things he had seen from the outside before but not truly understood. His heart burned like hands gone numb with clapping.

He returned to her bedside and sat down, resting his hand on hers with an awed caution, confessing, “To love in the midst of mortality is horrifying. I understand that now. It's such a risk. Your deaths are so unyielding, and your love is so unstoppable. I've never had to understand death as anything other than a motion between rooms. But for you...maybe your minds can't comprehend what happens when an unstoppable force and an immovable object collide, but you know what it feels like to be caught between them when they do,” he blinked, his vision misting, “And for all that, for all the ways it might destroy you when you live and when you die, you let yourselves love so fiercely. The depth of that sacrifice I...I understand now, and I think it will help me make fewer mistakes, be a better friend, a better angel. I just wanted you to know that. Thank you, Ray.”

He gazed at her as if from a long distance, gratified that her soul had taken up the small token of comfort he had given her, spreading it swiftly and smoothly as she slept. The leys of her energy bore the invisible light through her resonance like a melodic line or the path of a bee, meandering and yet artful, direct. He felt with joy the way-points of her being begin to unclench and open their chiming crystalline petals to receive it. Fascinated, he felt a mounting suspense as the weaving paths converged upon her Heart, closer and closer like the millisecond propagation of a lightning bolt.

The contact released a Sound like a thunderous bell, like love and death colliding, like a glacier of penance fracturing and tumbling into the sea, a sound too loud for flesh to hear. It ran right through him before he could react, massive and bombinating, and he stumbled away from the bed as if struck himself, boggling at the shock of it and turning his hands over in stupefied fear that something terrible might have just happened, looking to the bed to see if it had killed her.

Her face was relaxed and serene with dreams. She sighed and rolled onto her side away from him, murmuring, “Oh love...”

His heart still rang, and all he could do was stare, stricken, though it seemed as though everything was fine. What finally broke through the shock was the feeling of a phantom shiver through the air where his wings both should and should not have been, where they had been affixed to his back when he was made in heaven, and where they had burned away when he had fallen to earth.

The fear dissolved and he understood. He understood, and so he had Heard. He felt...purged. Comforted. Light. Ready to try again, to make things right. As the chime faded and ethereal feathers fluttered, one could hardly tell which had caused the other.

Meg would have made a joke about “It's a Wonderful Life”and laughed at him to show her fondness. Dean would have laughed at him to hide his. And if they had, Cas would have understood. Love is terrifying.

He leaned down close to Rachel's ear and whispered rebelliously, wary of being overheard, “You _will_ see her again. In a heaven worthy of the name. I promise.”

He looked at the door and stood very still. Then he was gone.

 


End file.
